My company still runs a large FoxPro application for its business. It started as dBase II, then moved to FoxBase, then eventually to Visual FoxPro. Development started in 1986, and is ongoing for new features, and there's still code (some of which I wrote) from 1987 running.

My first thought was the moon worms from Major Matt Mason stories/toys of the late 60s/early 70s.

Ah, ok:

There was also a Big Little Book, Moon Mission written by George S Elrick and illustrated by Dan Spiegle published in 1968 that had the astronaut and his friends confront both giant rabbits and huge burrowing worms on the moon.

I had the book and a couple of the astronaut toys. I didn't remember the rabbits until reading this...

A classic example is let/lassen. "Ich lasse mein Haar schneiden" doesn't literally mean "l let my hair be cut", although presumably it was a voluntary thing. However, the more precise translation would be "I have my hair cut", meaning, effectively that instead of permitting it to be done, I've ordered it to be done.

I noticed this while learning German as well, but I also noticed that you can see an echo of the German usage in programming/mathematics: LET X = 1, for example.